Why Isn’t My Website Getting Sales? #2 Analytics & Measurement

We continue our blog series, ‘Why Isn’t My Website Getting Sales?’ with a look at analytics and measurement. You might recall that last time we started at the end of the process by working on the checkout pages.

Now that you are in a position to take payments successfully, it is time to make sure that you know what is convincing customers to make those payments. How are they finding your website, what routes are they taking around your website and, perhaps most significantly, why or where are they leaving your website without making purchases?

Google Analytics

Most e-commerce platforms (including Shopify, which is what we use on most of our projects) have some analytics functionality built in. But it is worth beefing these up by installing Google Analytics on the site to get more details.

This will allow you to track which traffic sources, keywords and landing pages are driving sales. So, if sending an email generates twice as many sales for your website as two hours spent on social media, you can adjust how you spend your resources accordingly.

If you’re really ready to dive into getting the most of your Google Analytics account, follow this video course to learn all about the various measurement tools you can put in place to help you make informed decision that increase sales.

UTM codes

One of the keys to using analytics data to improve your website’s performance is to track everything. That means adding UTM codes to any url you share via any medium so that you can monitor the reach and success of that url.

Once you’ve set up your UTM codes and have them working in tandem with your Google Analytics account, you will have a much better idea of how your customers are finding your products.

A/B testing

Acquiring new visitors to your website can be expensive, so it is wise to work hard on conversion rate optimisation. In other words, increasing the percentage of your website’s traffic that converts into buying customers. One way to achieve this is A/B testing in which you compare the current version of your website with an amended alternative.

By testing various elements one at a time, you can gradually improve your website’s money-making potential over time. Things you might amend include layout and page design, pricing, headlines, product descriptions, promotions, shipping costs and images. It could be something as big as a homepage redesign or something as little as a new colour on a call-to-action button. Just remember never to change so much in a single test that you cannot determine what has caused any upturn or downturn in conversions.

Tools such as Optimizely offer simple A/B testing and make it easy to track what’s working and what isn’t. This Shopify blog post will help you with some useful starting points for what to test, while this Kissmetrics article gives you 101 ideas to improve your conversion rate.

As always, if you’ve got any questions, as always, feel free to get in touch.